Song of Slaves in the Desert

Copyright

Copyright © 2011 by Alan Cheuse

Cover and internal design © 2011 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

Cover design by Natalya Balnova

Cover images © Colin Anderson/Getty Images

Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

Published by Sourcebooks Landmark, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cheuse, Alan.

Song of slaves in the desert / by Alan Cheuse.

p. cm.

1. Slavery--Africa--History--Fiction. 2. Slavery--Southern States--History--Fiction. 3. Plantations--Southern States--History--Fiction. 4. Jews--Southern States--History--Fiction. 5. Jewish fiction. I. Title.

PS3553.H436S66 2011

813’.54--dc22

2010048514

Contents

Front Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven

Chapter Twenty-eight

Chapter Twenty-nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-one

Chapter Thirty-two

Chapter Thirty-three

Chapter Thirty-four

Chapter Thirty-five

Chapter Thirty-six

Chapter Thirty-seven

Chapter Thirty-eight

Chapter Thirty-nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-one

Chapter Forty-two

Chapter Forty-three

Chapter Forty-four

Chapter Forty-five

Chapter Forty-six

Chapter Forty-seven

Chapter Forty-eight

Chapter Forty-nine

Chapter Fifty

Chapter Fifty-one

Chapter Fifty-two

Chapter Fifty-three

Chapter Fifty-four

Chapter Fifty-five

Chapter Fifty-six

Chapter Fifty-seven

Chapter Fifty-eight

Chapter Fifty-nine

Chapter Sixty

Chapter Sixty-one

Chapter Sixty-two

Chapter Sixty-three

Chapter Sixty-four

Chapter Sixty-five

Chapter Sixty-six

Chapter Sixty-seven

Chapter Sixty-eight

Chapter Sixty-nine

Chapter Seventy

Chapter Seventy-one

Chapter Seventy-two

Chapter Seventy-three

Chapter Seventy-four

Chapter Seventy-five

Chapter Seventy-six

Chapter Seventy-seven

Chapter Seventy-eight

Chapter Seventy-nine

Chapter Eighty

Chapter Eighty-one

Chapter Eighty-two

Chapter Eighty-three

Chapter Eighty-four

Chapter Eighty-five

Chapter Eighty-six

Chapter Eighty-seven

Chapter Eighty-eight

Chapter Eighty-nine

Chapter Ninety

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Back Cover

For Minalu

An Eruption, the Stone

The shock wave jarred them from sleep and sent them stumbling to their feet. Next came the roar of exploding earth and a sky in flames. From that maelstrom in the heavens did a voice call out to them? Go! Hurry! The three of them, the man first, the woman following slightly behind, the child trailing off to one side, hurried away across the steaming plain, making their first marks, footprints, in the yielding layer of ash.

Light shifted behind the veil of smoky sky. The rumbling went on and on. The man shouted at the gathering mist, coughing as he breathed. The girl slowed up, listed toward the plain, reached down and plucked at the ash. They walked, they walked. Light turned over, revealing a blue sky streaked with a long tail of smoke and ash. The girl pulled away from her mother, clutching something in her hand.

This stone, relatively cool to the touch, born of an earlier eruption…this small, egg-shaped stone—black bluish purple mahogany cocoa dark fire within, three horizontal lines, one vertical, the same pattern carved into your high cheeks—take it and hold it to your lips. Taste earth and sky, the inside of a mouth, the lining of a birth canal, the faintest fleck of something darker even than the blackness through which it has passed. You have now kissed wherever this stone has been, and it has traveled far.

She said this to her child, as her mother had said to her, and her mother’s mother before that, and mothers and mothers and mothers, a line stretching all the way back to the first darkness and the first light, from where the stone had spurted up from the heart of the rift, in fire and smoke and steam, blurring the line where light of earth met light of sun, though at night the line showed starkly again.

Who first carved those lines on its face, three horizontal, one vertical? Three horizontal—the trek across the land. The one vertical—the ascent into the heavens. What hand and eye had kept them straight, in both directions, across and up and down? What hands had passed it along from time through time, until it lay in the palm of a man sprawled on his back on the desert floor between the town and the river?

Chapter One

________________________

To the West!

A single bright star glowed steadily like a stone fixed in the firmament of ocean blue sky above the red mosque, years and years back, when her grandparents were children. Their children? The jar-maker and his wife, he was the potter, she the weaver who made the cloth that held the jars with the distinctive design—three horizontal lines, one vertical—and supplied the household wares to the sheik who paid for the mosque. The father of the jar-maker had put him out to service with the sheik in exchange for the guarantee of an annual supply of grain for the family. In the seventh year of his service, when his father had died and the grain had rotted, the young artisan met the woman who would become his wife—because he noticed the cloth she had woven hanging in the market and imagined his jars wrapped in her weaving—a sign of lightning, a splash of rain, a distinctive design.

This turned out to be either a very good thing or a very bad thing. Her father would not give her up without a large payment, and the young jar-maker had to pledge another ten years to the sheik in order to buy this woman as his wife. As the story went, after the sheik, or, to be specific, his bookkeeper, agreed, the young jar-maker walked away, out to the edge of the town, where the river turned south—it flowed east from near the coast before bending around the city in its southerly way—and looked up into the clear sky and saw a river stork pinned by the light against the pale blue screen of air. He allowed his mind to soar up with the bird, wondering what the future might be like, and if he would ever become a free man, when in the distance the muezzin sang the call to prayer. The potter returned to the town having decided that he would give up one thing in his life, in this case, ten more years, in order to obtain another.

In a crowd of men dark-haired and white, he bent far forward and touched his forehead to the cool tiles of the floor, breathing in breath and sweat, sweet-wretched body-gas and tantalizing anise, and when he drew himself upright again he saw in his mind the weaver, the years ahead, and he knew that he had chosen the right path.

Who knows how to tell of the passing of ten years in happiness and some struggle in just a few words, so that the listener has a sense of how quickly time passes and yet still captures the bittersweet density of all that time together? Bodies entangled at night, hands working together at their craft, cooking, washing, bathing, cleaning, praying, and now and then stealing the time to wander along the river and do nothing but watch for the rising of that same stork he had seen on that day that now seemed so long past.

The weaver gave birth to their first child, a boy. And then another, a girl. And then, another girl.

(And oh, my dear, she said, try to tell you this about birth and you discover how far short of real life words fall, and yet how else to make any of these events known? Words! Words, words, words! The weight, the aches, the fears, the stirring, the shifting bleeding tearing pain and struggle! And the cries of mother, and child! But what do we have but memories, and these translated into words?)

And then there arose a situation on which everything else turned.

It had been the custom, as you may already have wondered about, that artisans such as the jar-maker and weaver might live outside the sheik’s compound, even as in other cities the situation might be the reverse. The jar-maker found this to be a good arrangement. It gave him all of the seeming liberty of a free man, at least in that he could move about the city, and when it came time to deliver his goods to the sheik’s compound he faced the bookkeeper almost as though he were an equal.

Six large water jars, he said one morning in the cool season when the river in the distance had become carpeted with migrating birds.

Six large water jars, the bookkeeper took notice. He recorded the transaction and with a wave of his stylus seemed ready to dismiss the jar-maker.

So it had gone with every delivery of every variety of container the jar-maker had created for his master, many times a year for a long number of years. Six water jars? Six water jars. Twenty cups? Twenty cups. Ten bowls? Ten bowls. He created them and delivered them. And dishes—yes, now and then the jar-maker turned dish-maker, using what he regarded as his wife’s family design—three lines horizontal, one vertical—for the plates from which the sheik and his guests would eat. Today, as was more often than not the case, it was diminutive jars. People drank from them often, which meant some got broken, always. Jars. The bookkeeper counted. And raised his hand to dismiss him.

Year in, year out.

All in the name of God.

The artisan in his soul felt as though his supposedly temporary arrangement with the sheik would last forever. His family was growing. And still he found himself, as if in a dream of continuous repetition sometimes talked about by street-shop philosophers in the town, arriving at the compound, ordering the assistant, a blue-black slave from the South given to him by the sheik, to carry the pottery, standing before the bookkeeper, and waiting to be dismissed.

A free life seems so simple, filled with small pleasures! All he desired in those moments was the right to turn and walk away without having to wait for the signal that he was dismissed. As discourteous as that would have been, he contemplated the delicious possibility of it.

But did that moment ever arrive?

Here in the shade of the courtyard, cool shadows drifting down on them and sheltering them from the direct rays of the sun and buffering the heat reflected off the red walls of the main house, he enjoyed feeling liberated within the confines of his indentured state, so that, it seemed to him in his momentary fantasy, if he stood still the moment would never pass and he could live within it, even push against its limits and enlarge them, until old age overtook him and he withered and died free.

A man never knew how free he might be until he became a captive, for a decade or a lifetime, and a free man never knew just how enslaved he was until he found himself behaving as though invisible ropes tethered him to a routine of years and months and days. And so the artisan stood there, deeply immersed in the moment, poised to turn at the lowering of the bookkeeper’s hand, fretting about the freedom he might never possess.

The bookkeeper cleared his throat, and the jar-maker shifted in his space, already turning.

Before you go… the sheik’s man said. There is something…

The jar-maker froze in place, fixed like one of the designs on his pots when the heat rose high enough to fix it forever. Freezing, heating—oh, he knew, he felt it in his blood, he was somehow done, done for this world.

The bookkeeper again cleared his throat in such a formal way that the jar-maker believed in that instant that he might be about to announce the sheik’s pleasure over the special designs.

I should not be telling you this.

Yes, sir?

The jar-maker, a man old enough so that if he were free others would address him with similar respect, gave the bookkeeper his best attention.

You must pack your bags. You and your family must pack your bags.

The jar-maker felt the chill and thrill of surprise running in his veins.

Why do you say this, sir?

The bookkeeper narrowed his eyes and leaned ever so slightly closer to the jar-maker.

I should not be saying this at all. But—

Again, a world in an instant! We’re free! the jar-maker told himself, free before our time! The sheik in his wisdom—

My master—

Yes, sir? The jar-maker interrupted, and then cursed himself for interrupting.

The bookkeeper did not appear insulted.

My master, who is your master, has, in his wisdom, arranged…

Yes, sir?

The bookkeeper retreated a step and turned his shoulder to the jar-maker.

As I said, I should not be speaking of this matter with you. You will hear tomorrow, and you will obey.

Hear what, sir?

The bookkeeper spoke again, and that bubble of the moment in which the jar-maker had stood collapsed suddenly around him, and he listened to the awful news the man delivered, though he was already, in his sudden desperation, backing away from the man, walking out into the outer courtyard, and hurrying along in the direction of the market.

The muezzin called out over the rooftops.

Time for prayer. Sluggards, hurry along! Time for prayer!

Time to pray, a rough-faced warder told him, standing at a corner, directing men to the mosque with a wave of a pointed stick.

I am going, the jar-maker said. His blood felt as though it had turned to water, a precious commodity on a summer day but for now a chilling reminder of what the bookkeeper had told him.

Go now, the warder said.

The jar-maker stepped past him, and just as the warder turned away to chastise another soul the jar-maker began to run.

What a good man, someone who saw him might have observed. He cannot wait too soon to pray.

He ran to his house where he hastily collected some belongings in a small bag and without any explanation ordered his wife to gather up a few necessities of clothing and get the children ready to depart.

Where are we—?

Do not inquire, he said, through clenched teeth.

He told her that she had only a few minutes and hurried out the door. When he returned with a donkey (for which he had traded the house and all their belongings!) he got the family mounted—one child on her lap, another behind her (the smallest in his own arms)—and riding toward the limits of the town, with him shuffling alongside even as prayers were ending and men began to move about the streets.

For the jar-maker, the trip to the marshes beyond the limits of the city took an eternity, and always at their heels he could hear—did he imagine it?—the approach of mobs of worshipers calling for his head. What was he doing but sundering the holy bond made between his late father and the sheik? Did it matter what condition this bond led him to? No, it did not matter. All important was the meshing of the words of these two men. His life, and the life of his wife and children, took second, third, fourth, fifth place to this pact. What kind of a world was this where such bonds tied people together, in fact, bound them hand and feet with invisible ropes?

They answered the question by the urgency of their flight. Never in his life had he rushed so headlong into a plan, or, perhaps we ought to say, retreated so vigorously from the life he knew. When the family reached the river it was time to stop a moment, and make a decision.

East or west?

To head east would take them deeper into the heart of the old world from which they were fleeing. Even though the river eventually turned south—or so the jar-maker had heard—and led back toward the ocean near which it originally formed, they would meet too much danger, from other sheiks and rulers large and small, in towns and encampments, in that direction. To the west lay the sources of the river, in highlands where few people lived, though before those hills and green-draped rises, another city—he knew, he had once heard directly from some travelers who originated there—sat on the river’s edge, and, because of its slightly more forgiving climate with respect to rains, a growing city at that.

Very well. He set the child down for a moment, pulled himself up to his full height, and then bowed in the direction of the red turrets they had just put behind them.

Then turned to the west.

To the west!

The day grew hotter as they traveled with the sun, though the animal moved so slowly that the sun eventually left them behind in a growing ocean of shadows of scattered river-shore plants and trees. Where did the sun go? The jar-maker knew there was an ocean some great distance in that direction, he had heard of it, yes, this vast body of water filled with a life of its own that led to other mysterious bodies of land. And his mind wandered toward it as they plodded along, and he wondered if he would ever see it. For the moment he gave his best attention to the river. The jar-maker, more and more aware of his wife’s fatigue and the children’s bewilderment, wanted desperately to make a crossing, but the water ran too deep in this season, and though they came to a ferry he decided it would be unwise to call attention to themselves by making the trip.

Red mud, dark water, now and then a flight of white birds that broke across the face of the fleeing sun, leaving, or so it seemed from the point from which they watched, a blanket of red clouds resting just beneath the still fiery light. As much as he would have liked for them to have kept moving, the jar-maker understood that it was time to stop. He helped the family from the animal’s back and took the bag of food as well before weighing down the beast’s rope with rocks he found at the waterside.

I’ll bathe the children, the weaver said, and she took them to the river while the jar-maker gathered wood for a small fire. Once the sky faded into the growing shadows of the night out here in the flatlands near the water the air would turn cooler by the hour. However dangerous it was, and just how dangerous he did not really know, no father wanted his children to catch a chill and fall sick. He watched them play in the water, enjoyed listening to their laughter. Here was the difference between animal and man—the small fire he built, daring the odds of discovery, so that the children might stay warm in their sleep. Immediately upon considering this thought he sank into a deep pit of gloom.

I could smell the fire, the weaver upon returning with the children. I wonder if it is safe?

He told her what he believed, and she acquiesced.

In a moment she was serving the figs and flatbread she had snatched from the larder during their last moments in the house. Not long after the food disappeared, the children lay down near the fire. It was good that they settled themselves, because long before sunrise they all must be awake and traveling again. However his daughter Zainab, a pale-skinned girl, tall for her sex, and prone to upset, could not find the handle of sleep. The weaver tried to soothe her, without success. In desperation her mother asked the jar-maker to tell the girl a story.

I can make shapes and designs, her father said, but I am not good at telling stories.

I want a tale, the restless girl said, speaking in a voice her father found slightly intimidating because of its new impersonal tone. And I want a story.

Is there a difference? her father said.

Yes, the girl said.

What is it? said her father.

I don’t know, the girl said.

Zainab pulled herself upright and sat waiting for her father to speak.

A tale, perhaps, her father said, tells about people you do not know. A story tells you about people you do.

I want both, the girl said.

The jar-maker cleared his throat, trying to rise above his awful feelings of despair and desperation at the thought of their plight. To be sold to a stranger to fill a temporary gap in the sheik’s finances? He felt suddenly a deep sense of pity for his master, that the man should find himself so desperate that he would break the bond between the two of them that the jar-maker had always fulfilled.

The air grew restless. Somewhere out in the star-lit dark a bird called and in the farther dark another bird answered. Suddenly the breeze rose, rustling the reeds and grass around them.

Tell me, Zainab said.

With her urging he began to speak, telling a story he had heard from his own father, who once told him that he had heard it from his father, who had heard it from his father, about a young man who scratched at rocks with a piece of metal, inscribing three horizontal lines and one vertical on the side of a large boulder near the great rift in the earth near where he was born. The boy had a good life, beloved of his parents, his father who was a farmer, his mother who gathered herbs, and—

Why do you stop? his daughter asked.

The jar-maker was listening. Beyond the farther dark, where the last birds called, something made a sharp barking noise.

What? said the weaver, who also had been giving her attention to the story, and now listened along with him for something else in the night.

The weaver stood up and reconnoitered their little campground.

The animal is gone, he said. I did not tie it well enough. In fact, I did not tie it at all.

Do not worry, his wife said. Now we have one less mouth to feed.

In the distance more barking.

Is that the donkey? his wife said.

A jackal, the jar-maker said.

Will the fire be enough to keep it away?

It will have to be, the jar-maker said.

Papa? Zainab said from where she lay.

Yes, the story, I know. Again, he cleared his throat. And he knelt back down near her, and talked on, until the girl had fallen asleep, his wife sagged against his shoulder, and the fire had dwindled to a few swirls of sparks that whirled about now and then in the light breeze.

He eased his wife onto the ground and lay down next to her, settling into an old and familiar comfort, despite the roughness of their bed and the fear in his mind. Here, where the late stars gradually asserted themselves in the sky, burning brighter and brighter as the fire diminished, he saw patterns he had not noticed before while living in the city, shapes and forms, also, though the law of God forbade such things as these. An animal head. A hunter’s arm, holding a bow. A belt holding at the waist of a figure so large it stretched across a quarter of the night sky. But, oh, God was so strong, all-powerful, it was blasphemy to make any figure because figures suggested the possibility of grasping an awareness of God’s face and being. And he grew ashamed, and then worried, and then repentant, and then disturbed, and then angry, and then calmed himself by taking out from his bag the small stone with the old markings and turning it over and over in his hands as he recited a prayer he knew, calming and calming himself with its repetition until he fell asleep.

He awoke at the bark of a jackal. The fire had died. Stars flickered brightly high above but gave no heat. An insect made a chirring noise nearby. In the marsh waters a fish, or snake, splashed like a stone hitting the water. Did fish sleep at night? The jar-maker wondered at the thought. His wife and children lay as quietly as creatures in the grave. Ay! Who wants thoughts such as that? They were merely sleeping, and, with God’s help, he would save them. Perhaps he did not pray as often as he should, putting so much time and care into his work as he did. But he never did anything against God. No, no, no. And if he was not free, why, then how could any man say he was truly free, because all men belonged to God? The sheik, for whom he had labored, also belonged to a Master, as did all the citizens, free and slave, in the town. Each of us has his own degree of enslavement, and all of us ultimately call ourselves the creatures of God.

His wife sat up.

What is it? she said.

The jar-maker listened attentively to the faint sounds in the dark.

Nothing. Jackals, wild dogs. They won’t come near. Go back to sleep.

He leaned to his left, feeling around for a stick large enough to club any invading beasts. He stood, and ranged out from the fireside, his eyes on the dark ground. Oh, if only there was wood! But then he remembered a small knife that he used as a tool and kept in his sack of essential belongings. He was bent over, on his knees, feeling around in the sack when they heard the camels.

Chapter Two

________________________

A Hebrew of New York

Some time ago, before our nation split in two and the opposing territories, north and south, initiated a great war over the question of freedom, yours truly, Nathaniel Pereira, climbed the plank on a Manhattan winter morning to board a south-bound yawl called the Godbolt. My father had charged me with a mission of some family business of the import-export variety. Earnest young man that I was, sandy-haired, blue-eyed, with a handsomely bent nose (which Marzy, our family servant, often joked with me about when I was a child) and just the beginnings of a beard on my pink cheeks, I could then little imagine how much such a journey would change my life and the lives of others in the family.

I awoke that special morning, before dawn, somewhat divided within myself and feeling my nerves. It had been a night of odd dreams about an army of Jews on horseback racing across a windy desert—yes, Jews, Jews, Jews, though I have never been a terribly observant member of my faith—and next came a dream-visitation, not uncommon to me in those days, by my dear late mother, who whispered imperatively about wearing a hat to keep away the cold and the importance of living as a Jew. After saying to the air the elemental prayer we Hebrews make each morning—Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One—and, as was my wont, reading a psalm aloud—for the poetry, as my dear old mop-haired fish-eyed master of a teacher George Washington Halevi always suggested (this one being Psalm 32, which I chose, as I usually did, at random, and begins Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered…)—I lay abed a while despite the urgency of the day.

Sluggard, arise! I heard Halevi’s voice in my mind.

To further prepare me for my inheritance—the care of the family business—my father had hired him as a tutor who worked with me on mathematics and history, philosophy, and Scripture. George Washington Halevi, whose own grandfather had been one of the few Jews who had fought in the Revolutionary War. His grandmother had been a farm girl from a Bronx estate, who attended to a soldier wounded in the Battle of New York. They produced his hybrid father, and his father had wed a Jewess from Rhode Island who produced him. Instead of going to Europe to study for the rabbinate, Halevi had attended Harvard College and was given the only divinity degree our people had received in the New World. Neither a full Hebrew in his own mind nor a Protestant of any standing, Halevi was a curious mixture of Old World and New, Jew and Gentile. A smart fellow then, with only a few difficulties, he was, first, so shy that he could scarcely talk to me about my subjects without trying to withdraw into the woodwork. Second, his breath smelled like manure. And, third, he sometimes stuttered in a terrible way.

Though his manner of speaking in public was less than pleasing, when he settled into himself and found the reassurance to speak, his voice dropped to a whisper and listening to him was like riding a winter sled down a nicely sloped snow-covered hill.

Master Nathaniel, he would say in that hoarse rasping way of his (and I laughed to myself as I lay abed recalling it), to-to-today we will consider the P-P-Principia of Sir Isaac Newton. Or, My question for you to consider is the origin of the stars. Or, F-free will, Nathaniel, d-d-does it exist? On this latter topic, we would talk for hours, because in my childish stubbornness I could never agree with his position.

If God wants us to do something, we do it, I said, hearing myself speak as though I were some wise sage instead of a slender boy with freckles, one slightly drooping eye, and legs so full of life that they would not stop quaking the more excited I became in our discussions.

The pagan philosophers say that we have a choice.

Do I have a choice this moment to speak or not speak?

You do.

But if I don’t, you will tell my father and he will be quite angry with me.

The choice remains.

Bad student or dutiful student?

Bad or good.

Our Hebrew God says what?

Nothing on the subject of free will. Obey and please Him, d-d-disobey and he will be quite angry.

Angry, but will He punish me?

Sometimes He does, sometimes He doesn’t.

An odd master, I said, wise before my time—or by mere momentary accident.

Y-yes, my tutor said. A quixotic plight we have, we Jews. Only the Christians have it worse.

They do?

Many of them believe their wills are bound to either evil or good. With no choice for them.

Like slaves to their God?

They bend their wills to His.

And we don’t?

We don’t bend. We choose.

Choose to give up our will? And is that freedom?

My tutor shook his head.

Let me consider this.

But I pursued it further just then.

When our republic broke from the British Crown, we chose to do so. And gained our freedom. Therefore freedom was not bending our wills to the throne but breaking away from it.

Bravo, young Nathaniel, my tutor said. You have made a good point, sir. A good point.

The day I asked him about whether or not he thought my pretty talking parrot Jacobus had a soul, he was also quite pleased. We spoke a little while of that, and then swerved back to his favorite topic, leaving me to ponder the question of the bird soul in my private thoughts.

We have no literature here in this country of ours, he said. The ground is seeded, but it has not yet bloomed. We have no time, as in history. And how can you have a story without history for it to blossom in? Read Shakespeare. We have not yet spawned our own.

This doesn’t sound good, I said.

It is neither good nor bad, he said. Think of it in this manner. We Jews do not yet have our savior, but one day the savior will come.

Though there was one American book he put forward. Which is how eventually I came into possession of a volume that I took to like a fish to water—the autobiography of our great Benjamin Franklin. Some boys worship their fathers, some worship themselves. I gave all my admiration to young Ben and hoped to live a life like his and emulate his rise from nothing to something.

Such thoughts inspired me that fateful early morning some time after my formal tutoring had ended, and I threw myself out of the bed, dressed, and descended, carrying my bags, to the street level kitchen as quietly as I could for fear of waking my Aunt Isabelle, my late mother’s sister, who had become as much of a mother to me as any woman not my mother could.

Red-head Marzy, our gimpy Old New York Dutch maid from a penniless family, was, of course, already awake and greeted me in the kitchen with the porridge.

I hope you have a good journey, sir, she said, her narrow eyes downcast. I thought it was perhaps because of her feeling some illness, or some guilt at having missed a chore. Lord knows how little she was paid, but I knew how much she had to do!

Thank you, Marzy, I said.

Oh, sir! she said, and burst into a thunderstorm of tears and nose-blowing.

Oh, sir! Oh, sir!

This screech of a voice belonged to Jacobus, whom my father had brought home to me from the Indies in the time after my mother died. (My immediate progenitor had been born there, to parents who had emigrated from Holland to make a fortune on the island of Curaçao, and when he reached his majority, after marrying my mother, another Antilles Jew, had emigrated to New York City. His half-brother, of whom much more in a moment or so, had felt a similar inclination to settle in our Promised Land but sailed up only as far north as Charleston, which was and still is, despite its wanton rebelliousness, at this writing, part of our South. How sad, and at the same time provident, that he could not make the other few days’ journey north, because where he disembarked changed everything.)

A louder noise up above, and I understood by the sound on the steps that it was my father coming down to meet me.

Good morning, sir, I said.

Good morning to you, Nathaniel.

He was a trim, bent-shouldered man, about an inch shorter than my own height of six feet, with shaggy gray hair and eyes just then still red with sleep that made me wonder if some brass band in his dreams might have serenaded him as he mused about sending me off to do his business in the world, which I was about to do on this out-of-the-ordinary day.

Quite a morning, he said as if reading my thoughts, while Marzy set his coffee on the table.

Yes, sir.

Yes, sir, yes sir!

He blinked into the light streaming in from the east side of our back kitchen.

Hush, Jacobus. And then to me: A good day to travel, it appears.

I nodded, and tried to put aside my anger. The week before, the two of us had sat in his study and quarreled, and this morning I was still bitter, for after having concluded my tutorials a month ago I was ready to set out on my grand tour before settling in as a junior partner in the family business of import-export. Instead my father informed me that first I must undertake a voyage to Charleston to make some inquiries into the affairs of his half-brother, who owned a plantation there.

A good fellow he is, my father had said, his accent, the product of his childhood in the Caribbean (and the faintest hint of his father’s Dutch) set ever so slightly at an angle to our New York speech. Though I have not seen him these many decades since we were boys together in Antigua. He writes to tell me that aside from now weighing as much as two Hebrew men of normal size he is in good health. And awaiting your arrival.

Awaiting my arrival, father? I had said.

Yes, he is.

And so you have been corresponding with him about this for some weeks now?

This happens to be so.

I shook my head. I wish I had known, Father. I am terribly disappointed. What matter could be so important that I have to travel down to Charleston instead of sailing off on my tour?

Your tour, Nathaniel, will come. But family comes first, however distant they may have been in earlier relations. My brother needs some looking to. I do not mean to set your mind against him but he fears that his only son may not be entirely capable of taking over the plantation. There is some question of the boy’s—now man’s—temperament. I had hopes that I might resolve this matter by letter and so have not spoken about it with you until now. Alas, my dear boy, things have not resolved. My brother has appealed to my familial responsibility. Which is why you must make the voyage to Charleston before the voyage to Europe. I need some advice about this matter. Should we or should we not invest in his enterprise so that we might offer both support and direction? That is the question.

Are we going to become tobacco merchants, or sell whatever it is he grows down there?

No, Nathaniel, not tobacco. Rice. Southern rice to feed the belly of the northern nation. A thousand acres of fields and rice-growing ponds. He paused and blinked into the sunlight as though he had only just discovered it had dawned. And a hundred slaves.

Slaves? Father, I know nothing about rice. And less about slaves. At this moment I cleared my throat and tried to assume a vocal posture of certainty. I certainly do not want to learn about either.

You will learn. You are old enough now to learn some things about business.

And young enough to know nothing, Father, I said.

I like humility in a man, Father said. He smiled, which produced in me a feeling of warm good will. You will know what to tell me soon enough about whether or not we should invest in my half-brother’s enterprise. He is a large man in many ways, this fellow of our blood. I do not know him very well, though am sure he would help me if I needed help. He has asked us for assistance that we cannot give without some investigation. It is my impression that we are his last resort. And you, young man, are mine. Will you help me?

Of course, Father, I said. But after this, Europe? I said. My tour?

Son, I promise you, assist us first in this matter and I will send you immediately thereafter. Remember, your mother was always a kind person. For her, family came first…

Yes, Father.

There is one more thing.

Yes, Father?

He pulled open the bottom drawer of his desk, took out a small pistol, and offered it to me.

Father?

Remember, the world is not always kind. A man needs protection while traveling, he said. The weapon is at the moment unloaded. Tomorrow I will buy you bullets. You are a man now, going about your father’s business. Carry this weapon always on your person. You may see some things down there in the South…well, never mind. For a moment I stared at it and then took it from him.

He next reached into his pocket and took out his gold timepiece, as if to establish that it was time for one thing and now it was time for another.

Your grandfather’s watch, he said. Which he consulted often while sitting in his office and looking out at the Carib palms. And which was next mine, and now yours. It is your watch, son, and from now on you will have to wind it.

Chapter Three

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In My Margins

What Are the Origins of Man?

Where had they come from? Out of the earth? Fire? Water? Water!

When the mountains sprung up out of the sea, and the cleft of water sprung into the light—

Because it does come first—

Yes, tell me the first part, first—

The mountains arose, and the water poured down their slopes back into the cleft left behind by the rising land, and fire seized the surface of the sea, and the rains came and the fire turned to smoke and the smoke rose to cover the face of the sun. Where once large animals wandered the land when it was hilly and covered with trees, and cleaved to another great mass of land that no one had a name for because no one had yet been born to give things names—

And after another great rain the sea remained burning, the smoke and steam rising higher and higher, and all the animals and trees went up in flame.

Pillars of fire and burning bush…?

Mountains melting and ice arising…and the seas in tumult…?

Do we know, do we know when and where it all began except to say that the oldest rocks came out of Africa and somewhere on those shores some fishy creature probably pushed its snout for the first time up from the sea into the air? This in a long life of reading and speculation is what we have come to believe. But the preachers say otherwise. What do the imams and the rabbis say?

Chapter Four

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Boarding the Godbolt

On this important morning, the first day of a new turn in my life that would change forever the direction I would take, I could feel the weight of that timepiece, wound and working, in my pocket—and the pistol—as I took a moment now to study my father’s face, and tried to imagine someone who looked nearly alike but weighed twice as much as he. I had some questions. But I gave up the thoughts as my Aunt Isabelle, looking, because swaddled in bed-clothes, twice her own normal size, came tottering down the steps from her room.

Dear boy, she said, dear, dear boy…

Her eyes were still dull from sleep, but nothing diminished the effervescent nature of her soul.

I shall miss you!

She glided up to me and touched a long extended finger to my collarbone.

Oh, how I shall miss you!

He’s not going that far away, my father said. Imagine if he were going off on his tour how long he’d be gone.

I wish I were, I said.

Don’t be ungrateful, Father said. You accomplish this mission, and I’ll send you on your travels for two years rather than one.

Truly, Father? Thank you, sir, thank you.

That would make me sadder still, said my Aunt Isabelle, turning away as if to mourn in solitude and reaching out a hand so that Marzy might offer her a cup of steaming coffee.

And make me happier, I said, but immediately, upon seeing the hurt I made in her—she glanced at me over her shoulder and rolled her eyes—tried to jolly my remark away as a joke and a laugh. Yes, sir, I said to the parrot.

Yes, sir, Jacobus said to me.

Marzy, weeping quietly, signaled to us that our cab was waiting.

And so Father and I went into the streets of early morning to the clatter of horses’ hooves and the cries of vendors and the shouts cast from one building to another as we crossed our narrow island on the way to the river.

I still had many questions for him about the business I was taking up, and about the specific nature of my journey. But he sat back against the seat, his eyes closed in thought, or as I saw him sometimes in synagogue, deep in prayer, and so I did not feel as though I might interrupt him just then. For, truth to say, I felt a confusion of things. I was a bit afraid and also quite honored and somewhat annoyed and a trifle curious as to what would happen on this journey. In all my twenty-some years I was a perfect Manhattan lad and had never wandered further from this rocky island than to the Bronx farm to the north and the Jersey cliffs to the west, and to that Perth Amboy harbor to the southwest, where my mother and I had disembarked when I was a boy of seven to quarantine ourselves against the illness that had swept across the lower part of our borough—to no avail, since she sickened and died soon after our arrival.

Oh, family! Oh, dear mother! As sweet as she was, that old Aunt Isabelle of mine, my late mother’s sister, could not take her place.

But hark! Music in the distance, to